Why it’s important to understand social media’s dark history

Why it’s important to understand social media’s dark history

Author

Associate Professor of Communication Studies, West Virginia University

Disclosure statement

Nicholas Bowman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

It was in April 2016 that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media platform was providing its nearly two billion users the opportunity to livestream content. The move was viewed as a natural extension of the platform’s primary goal: providing a space for the average person to share their daily experiences, from the mundane to the meaningful.

Stories of sexual aggression turned perhaps darker in 1998, when technology journalist Julian Dibbell wrote about a sexual assault that took place in a text-based online world called LambdaMoo. The notion of a sexual assault online might seem odd given that users have no physical contact with one another. Yet, a LambdaMoo user named “Mr. Bungle” hacked the program in a way that allowed him to have complete control over other users’ behaviors, such as their conversations and descriptions of their movements.

He used this hack to cause users to engage in obscene and violent sexual acts with their own bodies, having the players describe where and how they were touching themselves and others, but without consent, according to Dibbell’s account. Mr. Bungle claimed that his actions were just a prank, despite his victims’ insistence that they had been humiliated by his actions (or at least the actions that he forced them to perform or describe while performing). The story is notable, given that online relationships can be just as intimate and important as offline ones.

Later in 2006, users of MySpace would hear the tragic story of Megan Meier, a Missouri teenager who took her own life after the boy she met online (a MySpace user named “Josh”) shunned her. It was only later, after investigations were done, that Megan’s family found out that the boy “Josh” was really the mother of a girl that Megan had recently gotten into a fight with. That incident led to the passage of the United States’ first cyberbullying laws.

Understanding social media

These stories are examples of what can happen when a single user discovers ways to use a technology that weren’t intended by designers: using the anonymity of CompuServe to deceive, using clever programming scripts to alter other users’ behaviors, using blogs to draw attention to a minor offense, and using social media to create a false identity. In each case, deceptions and actions had dramatic real-life consequences for those involved.